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(b Wairoa, Hawke’s Bay, NZ, Aug 27, 1939).

Maori painter, carver, weaver, costume and stage designer. His involvement with art began at Te Aute Maori Boys’ College (1954–7), Hawke’s Bay, Waipawa County, and continued with formal art training at Ardmore Teachers’ College (1958–9) and at Dunedin Teachers’ College (1960), where he trained as an art specialist. He subsequently worked for the Department of Education as an arts and crafts adviser and served on committees for national art education policies, the Historic Places Trust (with particular reference to Maori sites), art museums and tribal committees (dealing with traditional and customary art forms and architecture). He helped to promote contemporary developments in Maori arts for community buildings, meeting houses, churches and public sites, serving on private and governmental commissions. In his own work he maintains a balance between the conservation of older traditional materials and forms of Maori arts and the experimental use of new materials, such as composite chipboard, synthetic dyes, plastic-coated basketry fibres and composite, laminated board. His painted and woven-fibre works are notable for their rich but subtle colours and controlled sense of line. They vary in size from complex architectural installations or stage designs for the Royal New Zealand Ballet to designs for postage stamps. At Te Huki Meeting House (...

Australian, 20th century, male.

Active also active in the USA.

Born 30 January 1885, in Kew (Melbourne); died 11 February 1969, in London.

Painter, draughtsman, stage set designer, engraver (etching, linocut), illustrator, writer, critic. Scenes with figures, portraits.

London Group.

Horace Brodzky was born in Australia but ultimately settled in Britain. In ...

(Russell)

(b Daylesford, Victoria, May 6, 1939).

Australian architect and stage designer. He graduated from the University of Melbourne (1966) and then studied at Yale University, New Haven, CT (1966–9), and worked briefly for several notable architectural firms in the USA, including those of Paul Rudolph and Philip Johnson. He was impressed by Robert Venturi’s attempt to use popular culture to forge a new regional idiom (see Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown), and, on his return to Australia in 1974, he began to develop a new ‘poor architecture’ based on a provocative, angular reinterpretation of everyday suburban forms and materials, combined with elements from canonical works of Modernism. In 1975, together with Maggie Edmond (b 1953), he formed the firm of Edmond & Corrigan; and he also began to teach at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in the late 1970s. His work and teaching subsequently had a powerful influence on younger architects in the city. Corrigan typically used bright clashing colours, patterned brickwork and awkward colliding and distorted forms in his buildings. Notable early work included the Resurrection Church, primary school and housing (...

New Zealander, 20th century, male.

Active in Britain from the late 1930s or early 1940s; also active in the USA.

Born 1916, in New Zealand; died 3 July 1994, in Devonshire, England.

Painter, illustrator, set designer, cartoonist, decorator. Landscapes with figures, seascapes, landscapes, murals.

Felix Kelly was born in New Zealand and came to Britain before World War II. He worked in advertising for a time, then took up painting seriously during the war. He also worked in the USA and became known as a painter of country houses in both countries. He painted in a Neo-Romantic style, depicting fantastic landscapes and buildings, both imagined ( ...

(Robert)

(b Melbourne, April 22, 1917; d London, Nov 28, 1992).

Australian painter, draughtsman, printmaker and stage designer. Australia’s most honoured and internationally acclaimed modern painter, and one of the most travelled artists of his generation, he worked prolifically in a variety of media on themes that often related closely to the story of his own life. He remained a controversial figure, considered by Kenneth Clark to be one of the major artists of the 20th century, but often criticized for trying to do too much. Alternating bright moods with blackest drama, he tended to work in series, reviving formal elements and iconography from previous works and maintaining a spontaneous style by devising new painting techniques in the process of execution.

Nolan was enrolled twice at the National Gallery of Victoria’s School of Art (1934 and 1936) while employed as a commercial artist, but he preferred to educate himself in the public library. Reproductions of works by Picasso, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse and the Surrealists influenced his idiosyncratic, quasi-abstract works of the late 1930s, for example ...